Tag: Bible

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 176

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mass Shoot­ings at Hous­es of Wor­ship: Pitts­burgh Attack Was Among the Dead­liest (Sarah Mer­vosh, NY Times): “Mass shoot­ings have become a recur­ring part of Amer­i­can life, and reli­gious insti­tu­tions a recur­ring set­ting. In each case, the shock is com­pound­ed by the vio­lence at what is sup­posed to be a safe space for peace and heal­ing.”
    • Relat­ed: If You Hate Jews, You Hate Jesus (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “I will often hear Chris­tians say, ‘Remem­ber that Jesus was Jew­ish.’ That’s true enough, but the past tense makes it sound as though Jesus’ Jew­ish­ness were some­thing he sloughed off at the res­ur­rec­tion. Jesus is alive now, enthroned in heav­en…. When Jesus appeared before Saul of Tar­sus on the Road to Dam­as­cus, the res­ur­rect­ed Christ intro­duced him­self as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ (Acts 22:8). Jesus is Jew­ish, present tense.”
    • Relat­ed: Holi­ness & Dr. Cohen (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “What Dr. Cohen — who is a mem­ber of Tree of Life syn­a­gogue — and his Jew­ish staff showed is moral courage, but more than that, it is holi­ness.”
    • Relat­ed: The Jews of Pitts­burgh Bury Their Dead (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “‘We, the Jews, are good at death,’ says Rab­bi Seth Adel­son, whose syn­a­gogue, Beth Shalom, is less than a mile from Tree of Life. ‘The cus­toms that we ful­fill at this time are real­ly help­ful for those who have suf­fered a loss.’ In the face of extra­or­di­nary tragedy—the dead­liest attack on Jews in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, accord­ing to the Anti-Defama­tion League—ordinary rit­u­als help Jews grieve.”
  2. ‘God Is Going to Have to For­give Me’: Young Evan­gel­i­cals Speak Out (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “With just days left before the midterm elec­tions — two years after Pres­i­dent Trump won the White House with a record share of white, evan­gel­i­cal sup­port — we asked young evan­gel­i­cals to tell The Times about the rela­tion­ship between their faith and their pol­i­tics.” These are inter­est­ing inter­views, although I sus­pect a skew in the sam­ple.
  3. The Big and Small World of Bible Geog­ra­phy (David Bar­rett, The Gospel Coali­tion): “As I have stud­ied and mapped the events of Scrip­ture over the years, I have been struck by an intrigu­ing para­dox: The world of the Bible was at the same time very small and very large.” Rec­om­mend­ed for the pic­tures even more than the text.
  4. What Pro­gres­sives Can Learn From Michael Avenatti’s Mis­take (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Inso­far as Democ­rats are con­vinced that Amer­i­ca is a white-suprema­cist patri­archy, that racism and sex­ism were the deci­sive fac­tors cost­ing Democ­rats the 2016 elec­tion, and that fas­cism is nigh, you can see how they would con­clude that a Cory Book­er or an Eliz­a­beth War­ren can’t real­ly best Trump, or would face much longer odds than a white man, and that win­ning should be the pri­or­i­ty. Con­jure in your mind an insti­tu­tion­al­ly racist, white-suprema­cist patri­archy. Does its pop­u­lar­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent look like Kamala Har­ris?” This is the most provoca­tive­ly insight­ful thing I read this week.
    • Not real­ly relat­ed, just sim­i­lar­ly provoca­tive: The Real Rea­son They Hate Trump (David Gel­ern­ter, Wall Street Jour­nal): “The dif­fer­ence between cit­i­zens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or mere­ly tol­er­ate him—comes down to their views of the typ­i­cal Amer­i­can: the farmer, fac­to­ry hand, auto mechan­ic, machin­ist, team­ster, shop own­er, clerk, soft­ware engi­neer, infantry­man, truck dri­ver, house­wife.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of com­put­er sci­ence at Yale..
  5. Free rent in Seat­tle, no catch: Land­lords’ faith inspired a gift for ten­ants (Mike Rosen­berg, Seat­tle Times): “They’re also devout Pen­te­costal Chris­tians. When Slaatthaug, a 74-year-old retired car­pen­ter, does repairs at the build­ing, he dri­ves there in a Jeep with a 4‑foot-tall Bible on top. The Old Tes­ta­ment has a pas­sage about the year of jubilee — every 50 years, debts are to be for­giv­en. So Slaatthaug and Bam­brick are cel­e­brat­ing the family’s 50 years as prop­er­ty own­ers by doing some­thing unheard of for a land­lord: For the month of Novem­ber, every­one in the 11-unit build­ing goes rent-free.”
  6. Kiss­ing Puri­ty Cul­ture Good­bye (Abi­gail Rine Favale, First Things): “Chris­tian­i­ty does not offer mere pre­scrip­tions; it offers a world­view, one cen­tered on a God who descend­ed into our bod­i­ly nature and there­by viv­i­fied it. With­in the con­text of this world­view, the sex­u­al mores of Chris­tian­i­ty become com­pelling, con­nect­ed as they are to the cos­mos as a whole. Removed from this con­text, they enslave.”
  7. Lack Of Atten­tion To Chi­nese Inter­pol Chief’s Dis­ap­pear­ance Shows The Khashog­gi Furor’s Fak­ery (Ben Wein­garten, The Fed­er­al­ist): “Why do cer­tain indi­vid­ual vic­tims of tyran­ni­cal regimes become cause célèbres, wor­thy of dra­mat­i­cal­ly alter­ing U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, while oth­ers dis­ap­pear into the ether? …con­cur­rent with the Khashog­gi affair, Meng, the pres­i­dent of Inter­pol, also dis­ap­peared, and may have suc­cumbed to a sim­i­lar­ly grim fate at the hands of Chi­nese hench­men. Let me repeat that: The pres­i­dent of Inter­pol, the world’s largest inter­na­tion­al police orga­ni­za­tion, dis­ap­peared.” I dis­like the title of this piece and the way it frames a few things, but it rais­es a very impor­tant point.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 137

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Lar­ry Nas­sar Tes­ti­mo­ny Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than For­give­ness. (Mor­gan Lee inter­view­ing Rachael Den­hol­lan­der, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “One of the areas where Chris­tians don’t do well is in acknowl­edg­ing the dev­as­ta­tion of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the dev­as­ta­tion of any kind of suf­fer­ing but espe­cial­ly sex­u­al assault, with Chris­t­ian plat­i­tudes like God works all things togeth­er for good or God is sov­er­eign. Those are very good and glo­ri­ous bib­li­cal truths, but when they are mis­ap­plied in a way to damp­en the hor­ror of evil, they ulti­mate­ly damp­en the good­ness of God. Good­ness and dark­ness exist as oppo­sites. If we pre­tend that the dark­ness isn’t dark, it damp­ens the beau­ty of the light.”
  2. Want to see a spat between two bril­liant the­olo­gians?
    • The New Tes­ta­ment in the strange words of David Bent­ley Hart (N.T. Wright, The Chris­t­ian Cen­tu­ry): “When a the­olo­gian of the stature of David Bent­ley Hart offers a ‘piti­less­ly lit­er­al trans­la­tion’ of the New Tes­ta­ment that is ‘not shaped by lat­er the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal his­to­ry’ and aims to make ‘the famil­iar strange, nov­el, and per­haps new­ly com­pelling,’ we are eager to see the result. He promis­es to bring out the ‘wild­ly indis­crim­i­nate polypho­ny’ of the writ­ers’ styles and emphases, con­verg­ing on their ‘vibrant cer­tain­ty that his­to­ry has been invad­ed by God in Christ in such a way that noth­ing can stay as it was.’ But his two main claims (to be ‘lit­er­al’ and ‘undog­mat­ic’) are not borne out, and the promise of dis­play­ing the strange­ness of ear­ly Chris­t­ian life dis­ap­pears behind dif­fer­ent kinds of strange­ness.”
    • A Reply To N.T. Wright (David Bent­ley Hart, Eclec­tic Ortho­doxy): “[A rebut­tal] where­in, at long last, our author unbur­dens him­self of a great num­ber of com­plaints he has long wished to make against that pious man’s earnest but prob­lem­at­ic approach to the New Tes­ta­ment, embell­ished with a few moments of sly mock­ery, but ulti­mate­ly intend­ed as a good-natured—albeit inflexible—expression of deep dis­agree­ment.”
    • Trans­lat­ing the N. T. Wright and David Bent­ley Hart Tus­sle  (Caleb Lind­gren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While the ver­bal spar­ring is both sharp and enter­tain­ing (and per­haps off-putting to cer­tain sen­si­bil­i­ties), there is a valu­able point at the heart of this debate—one that is worth not­ing as these two Bible schol­ar­ship heavy-hit­ters take swings at each other’s work.”
  3. Fake porn is the new fake news, and the inter­net isn’t ready (Nicole Lee, Engad­get): “Moth­er­board recent­ly uncov­ered a dis­turb­ing new trend on Red­dit, in which users cre­ate AI-gen­er­at­ed porno­graph­ic clips by swap­ping oth­er peo­ple’s faces onto porn stars…. Need­less to say, this has fright­en­ing con­se­quences. Not only does this open the door for a hor­ri­fy­ing new kind of revenge porn, where a venge­ful ex could slap your face on an X‑rated video, it also opens a Pan­do­ra’s box of fears where noth­ing on the inter­net can ever be trust­ed.” The embed­ded (non-sketchy) gif is alarm­ing­ly real­is­tic. The tech­nol­o­gy is already good enough that we’re at a tip­ping point, and it will only get more effec­tive in the future.
  4. A Work­out-Track­ing App Acci­den­tal­ly Revealed The Loca­tion Of A Bunch Of Secret Mil­i­tary Bases And Sol­diers’ Names (Digg): “Stra­va, a GPS-enabled mobile app that allows users to track their run­ning, bik­ing and swim­ming work­outs, is attract­ing con­tro­ver­sy after observers noticed that its glob­al work­out heatmap appar­ent­ly revealed the loca­tion of secret mil­i­tary bases and the exer­cise habits of indi­vid­ual troops on those bases.” Oops. Tech­nol­o­gy has con­se­quences. Remem­ber that, you star­tup­py types.
  5. The Abor­tion Memo (David Brooks, New York Times): “I’m ask­ing us to rethink our pri­or­i­ties. What does Amer­i­ca need most right now? One of our talk­ing points is that late-term abor­tions are extreme­ly rare. If they are extreme­ly rare, why are we giv­ing them pri­or­i­ty over all of our oth­er issues com­bined?”
  6. The female price of male plea­sure (Lili Loof­bourow, The Week): “Because if you’re going to wax poet­ic about male plea­sure, you had bet­ter be ready to talk about its secret, unpleas­ant, ubiq­ui­tous cousin: female pain. Research shows that 30 per­cent of women report pain dur­ing vagi­nal sex, 72 per­cent report pain dur­ing anal sex, and ‘large pro­por­tions’ don’t tell their part­ners when sex hurts.” First, fas­ci­nat­ing because I had no idea. Sec­ond, because the author is so cocooned in assump­tions stem­ming from the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion that she doesn’t seem to have con­sid­ered whether this is a symp­tom of the whole thing being unhealthy and mis­tak­en on key points.
  7. Show­ing Off To the Uni­verse: Bea­cons For The After­life of Our Civ­i­liza­tion (Steven Wol­fram, per­son­al blog): “There’s a thought exper­i­ment I’ve long found use­ful. Imag­ine a very advanced civ­i­liza­tion, that’s able to move things like stars and plan­ets around at will. What arrange­ment would they put them in? Maybe they’d want to make a ‘bea­con of pur­pose’. And maybe—like Kant—one could think that would be achiev­able by set­ting up some ‘rec­og­niz­able’ geo­met­ric pat­tern. Like how about an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle? But no, that won’t do. Because for exam­ple the Tro­jan aster­oids actu­al­ly form an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle with Jupiter and the Sun already, just as a result of physics. And pret­ty soon one real­izes that there’s actu­al­ly noth­ing the aliens could do to ‘prove their pur­pose’. The con­fig­u­ra­tion of stars in the sky may look kind of ran­dom to us (except, of course, that we still see con­stel­la­tions in it). But there’s noth­ing to say that looked at in the right way it doesn’t actu­al­ly rep­re­sent some grand pur­pose.” A long but fas­ci­nat­ing essay about how dif­fi­cult it is to encode a mes­sage that unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cates intel­li­gence. Rel­e­vance to nat­ur­al the­ol­o­gy should be obvi­ous (although Wol­fram, being an athe­ist, goes in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion).
  8. Some of our stu­dents and alum­ni have pub­lished things recent­ly:
    • The One Les­son We Do Not Learn at Stan­ford (Hugh Zhang, The Stan­ford Review): “If we fail to devel­op the type of char­ac­ter need­ed to resist temp­ta­tion when the stakes are so low, how can we be trust­ed to resist them when they are high­er? What we do at Stan­ford is less harm­ful than the fail­ings of the pow­er­ful. But it is only less harm­ful because our pow­er is yet lim­it­ed. When those in promi­nent posi­tions act as we do, we right­ly fear for society’s well being…. If we tru­ly believe that the duty of a uni­ver­si­ty is to pre­pare us for our respon­si­bil­i­ties in the world beyond these idyl­lic palm trees, then the most impor­tant les­son we can learn here at Stan­ford is the age old les­son of integri­ty: the abil­i­ty to do what is right even when no one is look­ing.”
    • Can I Help You? (Ryan Eber­hardt, per­son­al blog): “My friend Arjun com­mit­ted sui­cide last Sep­tem­ber. I’m ‘over it’ in as much of a func­tion­al sense as pos­si­ble, but I still think about him all the time. I miss him so much. He was among my best friends in high school…. I wish I could tell him about all the things I’m up to these days, brain­storm things for me to pur­sue after grad­u­a­tion, and ask for his advice. That will nev­er hap­pen again. But here’s the fun­ny thing: I don’t know if I would be so eager to talk to him if he weren’t dead. Death has an inter­est­ing way of doing that.”
    • Revers­ing the Curse: A Spir­i­tu­al Guide to Decod­ing Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (Femi Olu­tade, Medi­um): “For those of you who are root­ed in a faith tra­di­tion but can’t under­stand how a pop­u­lar, ‘sec­u­lar’ rap album can be a faith­ful wit­ness to Jesus’s life and mis­sion, Kendrick — and Jesus for that mat­ter — may sur­prise you. For any­one who is still search­ing for how truth and jus­tice emerge from the shad­ow of racism and oppres­sion, I present to you the sto­ries of hip hop and Judeo-Chris­t­ian scrip­tures in the hope that you can find in them the kind of trans­for­ma­tion that I have expe­ri­enced.” Femi releas­ing this free online book bit by bit. Seth, who writes the for­ward is also one of our alum­ni.
    • Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice (Rebekah Fen­ton, Kev­in­MD): “Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice dur­ing the class­room phase. Why do we only show rash­es on Cau­casian patients? Why do we only learn to rec­og­nize how men present with MIs? Why do we not address how obe­si­ty impacts exam find­ings? Med­ical edu­ca­tion favors the white, thin, male patient. I’ve seen his chest X‑ray, I’ve exam­ined his abdomen, I know his symp­toms, and I’ve seen his rash­es.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.